How Mexican immigration helped make America great

Donald Trump has some seemingly simple strategies to stop many Mexicans migrating to the US, but the relationship between the two North American neighbours is a complex one. As Annabelle Quince explains, much of south-west America was once part of Mexico, and without Mexican labour the US agricultural industry would be in trouble.

It's obvious from the names of some of America's biggest cities that they have a Spanish-speaking heritage. Settlements like Santa Fe, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and San Diego fall within the swathes of south-west America that were colonised by Spain and were then, for centuries, part of Mexico.

They know there are jobs, they know there are people who will hire them, and yet at the same time there is all this hostility towards Mexican immigrants.

Tim Henderson, Auburn University

However, after Mexico's defeat in the American–Mexico war of 1846–1848 the border shifted almost a thousand miles to the south, as academic Neil Foley from the Southern Methodist University explains.

'Out of that northern half that was seized after the US–Mexico war ... the United States was able to carve out territories that then became six complete states—the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, in addition to Nevada and Utah—and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Arkansas and Oklahoma,' he says.

'That's a huge, huge chunk of real estate that overnight made Mexican citizens American citizens.

'According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the roughly 100,000 Mexicans living north of the new international boundary were given one year to declare their Mexican citizenship. If they didn't declare their Mexican citizenship they automatically became US citizens.'

For that generation of Mexicans, they didn't come to the border, the border came to them. Mario Garcia, a professor at the University of Southern California, says that's what gives the story of Mexican immigration an interesting twist.

'Later Mexican immigrants, as they began to come in large numbers into the 20th century, are coming back into areas that once were part of Mexico, that already have a resident Mexican-American population.

'They're coming to an area that literally speaks to them in their own language. No other immigrant population in the United States has that history.'

Railways and farms spur the beginning of migration

It wasn't until the late 1800s and early 1900s that Mexican migration to America really began.

'First of all there were railroads built in Mexico, and those railroad lines connected to lines in the United States, so it became just a much easier trip to get northward,' says Tim Henderson, a professor at Auburn University.

'Second, there was a bill in the United States called to the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which provided lots of money for irrigation works in the south-western United States, which made what had been basically barren desert into very valuable farmland. And when there were new cotton plantations and fruit plantations and so forth, there was of course a very dramatically increased demand for labour.'

Simultaneously, Henderson says, there was an 'explosion of nativism' in the United States that was particularly directed against Asians. By 1917 the US had created the 'Asiatic Barred Zone', barring anybody from Asia to the United States—and cutting off a key source of labour.

So the United States looked to Mexico, Henderson says. 'Mexicans and other Latin Americans were free to migrate as much as they pleased and they became the dominant labour force in the Southwest.'

There were no restrictions at all on movement across the border until 1917. From that year, travellers were required to pay a small fee and submit to a medical inspection. Those who didn't, Henderson says, were the first 'illegal immigrants'.

'There were a certain percentage of people who decided they didn't want to do that; they couldn't afford the fee—it was $8 a person, and that was a lot of money for an impoverished Mexican in 1917,' he says.

Garcia, though, argues that the concept of the illegal alien emerged in 1924 with the establishment of the border patrol. Quota laws severely restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe and almost completely excluded immigration from Asia.

'There were efforts to extend the quota laws to Mexico and Latin America but the pressure and the influence of agribusiness and the mining industry in the railroads prohibited that,' Garcia says.

'The border patrol was established to at least provide a sense that they were controlling those who were coming in without documents. But the fact is that in the 1920s even more Mexican immigrants crossed the border into the United States because the industries wanted them.'

Mexicans seen as scapegoats as US sinks into Depression

During the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929, the demand for labour in the United States decreased. This had a profound effect on Mexican migration.

'By the early 1930s ... there's a great sense of competition for whatever jobs still remain, and people began to look for scapegoats,' Garcia says.

'Unfortunately people began to scapegoat Mexican immigrants, certainly in the Southwest and in California ... they were accused of taking jobs from real Americans, and they were accused of bringing in diseases and crime and delinquency, and all of this to justify rounding up people of Mexican descent and deporting them.'

Garcia estimates that about half a million people of Mexican descent were sent across the border to Mexico in the early 1930s—making it the largest deportation in American history.

'Notice that I said that about half a million people of Mexican descent were sent to Mexico, I didn't say they were sent back to Mexico. It is estimated that maybe the majority of those who were sent to Mexico should have never been sent because they were US citizens,' he says.

As World War II began, Mexican labour was once again in demand in America because of the shortage of manpower. In 1942 the US signed a bilateral agreement with its ally Mexico called the Bracero Program.

'Between 1942 and the end of the war, we had allowed, through temporary contracts, not visas ... hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers,' Foley says.

'We didn't have small farms by then, we had huge, huge agribusiness companies growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables for a rapidly growing US population. They did not want them to go home. They loved that cheap labour and wanted to keep it. And so the growers lobbied the United States Congress, which allowed them to keep the Bracero Program going until 1964.'

As Henderson points out, the Bracero Program also greatly increased the volume of illegal immigration from Mexico.

'It was really difficult to get Bracero contracts, and so a lot of people decided just to forego all the formalities and just migrate illegally.

'After World War II one of the things that the United States adopted was ... they referred to it as "drying out the wetbacks", which meant that the United States would round up illegal immigrants and they would transport them to the border and, believe it or not, they would actually get them to put one foot over the border, touch Mexican soil, come back, and then they would be rewarded with a Bracero contract.

'Mexicans come to understand that the easiest route to get a Bracero contract was to cross the border illegally and then be legalised through this so-called drying out process.'

Mixed signals from the American government

Despite the wishes of agribusiness, by the early 1950s there was a concern that Mexican were being used in jobs that could be done by 'American' workers. In 1954, then president Dwight Eisenhower instituted 'Operation Wetback' to remove many Mexicans from US soil.

Henderson describes it as 'a mass deportation operation where Mexicans were rounded up wherever they could be found and they were transported across the border'.

'Exactly how many were deported at that time is a matter of some dispute, but it was a lot,' he says. 'Of course it was a human rights disaster because it meant that a lot of American citizens were deported, families were broken up, all that sort of thing.'

Despite the deportations, undocumented workers continued to come. As Mario Garcia explains, these workers are particularly prized by some employers.

'They know how vulnerable undocumented immigrants are, so they can pay them the least amount of wages, they feel they can totally control them, they won't give them any trouble,' Garcia says.

The problem for many Mexicans was that the United States always sent mixed signals about illegal immigration. Some farm-owning senators inserted a clause called the Texas proviso into the immigration reform law of 1952, which said explicitly that it was illegal to be a Mexican immigrant, it was illegal to harbour or transport a Mexican immigrant, but it was perfectly and explicitly legal and OK to employ a Mexican immigrant.

'It let employers completely off the hook for this,' Henderson says.

'The message that was being sent was: "We really want Mexicans to come here but we are going to pretend that we have some sort of respect for the law. And we will complain about illegal immigration but at the same time we really want you here. But yet we don't."

'It must be very confusing from the point of view of Mexican people, because they know there are jobs, they know there are people who will hire them, and yet at the same time there is all this hostility towards Mexican immigrants.'

From Reagan's reforms to a backlash

As president, Ronald Reagan argued that Mexican migration was a problem and that the borders were not controlled. But rather than deportations, he proposed an amnesty.

'It is estimated about maybe three million were given amnesty ... with a sense that maybe this might help to control undocumented immigration,' Garcia says. 'It didn't really do it because you already had many undocumented immigrants who had come after 1980 and they weren't given amnesty, so they still remained under the shadow, so to speak.'

The other aspect to that reform was ensuring that employers were now also held liable for employing undocumented workers. But, Garcia says, there was no real enforcement.

'Immigration officials didn't have the number of inspectors that could possibly go all over the country trying to find out whether employers were hiring undocumented immigrants,' he says.

'It was a threat but that's all that it was. And the fact is that by the 1980s and certainly the 1990s this country had basically institutionalised various jobs as immigrant jobs. Service jobs, construction jobs— all of these now were immigrant jobs, and employers were only going to hire immigrants, and primarily undocumented immigrants.'

The backlash to Reagan's immigration reform was in motion by 1994, when California voters passed a referendum known as Proposition 187.

If Proposition 187 had been made law, any person who couldn't show that they were in the country legally would not be entitled to public school education, from kindergarten to university, and could not be treated in hospitals for non-emergency medical care.

'Of course that did not pass constitutional muster, the courts threw it out,' Foley says. 'But 57 per cent of the California populace voted for that. That tells you something.'

Mario Garcia argues that Proposition 187 speaks to the ongoing tension between anti-immigration campaigners and business.

'If they could have it they would have open borders,' he says.

'Employers, industries welcomed these immigrants. But there are others who feel that the immigrants represent economic competition, although most studies suggest … there is no competition because these are now institutionalised immigrant jobs: US-born Americans aren't going to be hired in them anyway, and US-born Americans don't want those jobs.'

A growing proportion of American voters

Today these tensions are exacerbated by the changing nature of American society. As Garcia points out, Latinos are the largest ethnic group in California and New Mexico.

'When that happens to a state like California you have to wonder about the politics of the future, especially when you consider how the Republicans are trying to outdo themselves bashing Latinos,' he says.

By Foley's calculations, the states where most Latinos live—California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and New York—are together worth about 171 electoral votes, or 63 per cent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.

'That's where the Latinos are, which is not surprising because that's where you would find most of the jobs—and also historically they have been in those states for a long time,' he says.

'If you can't get Texas, California and Florida, you're going to have a hard time getting the presidency. This tells us something about what the future is.'